Stone's characters wear their emblematic responsibilities so naturally that A Flag for Sunrise works as an adventure yarn, but on the level at which it aspires to greatness, the book is about the process by which ideas—theologies, ideologies—flesh themselves out and become institutions, and about how they are damaged in transit. This layering should come as no surprise to readers familiar with Stone's stunning Dog Soldiers …; what is unexpected, however, is the anachronous gap between the new book's layers. The adventure story is the stuff of tomorrow's network news, but the philosophical concerns are embedded in a rhetoric—and in a view of the world—utterly foreign to the book's spy-versus-spy surface.

What one first notices about Stone's language, however, is not its anachronistic quality, but its raw power. If this man wants you to have the heebie-jeebies, you're damn well gonna have 'em. Stone doesn't...